National Bank of Pakistan Signs Agreement with Microsoft

Karachi, March 29, 2012: National Bank of Pakistan has entered into an agreement with Microsoft Pakistan. The signing ceremony took place at the National Bank of Pakistan Head Office in Karachi. The Microsoft Enterprise Agreement will enable National Bank to use Microsoft Virtualization, Unified Communication, Business Process Automation, Private Cloud technologies as well as Premier Support to provide enterprise class technology support services.

The agreement was signed by Mr. Kamal Ahmed, Country General Manager, Microsoft Pakistan and Mr. Mahmood Siddique, CIO, National bank of Pakistan. Also present at the ceremony were Sayed Hashish, GM Microsoft NEPA, Mounir Bouzouba, Business Manager, Microsoft NEPA and Abid Zaidi, Commercial Segment Lead, Enterprise Group, Microsoft Pakistan.

Talking about the agreement Mr. Kamal Ahmed said, “Microsoft believes in providing custom based solutions to its customers. This accord will not only help optimize the IT infrastructure of National Bank but the software solution provided by Microsoft will enable the bank to achieve maximum efficiency.”

Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout organization. From accelerating application deployments to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.

Mr. Mahmood Siddique, CIO, National Bank of Pakistan said, “Keeping abreast with the changing financial world and meeting the banking needs of our customers, effectively and efficiently, is very important to us. Through an integrated IT infrastructure that Microsoft is developing for us, we will be able to deploy, manage and help secure timely solutions for our clients.”

The Microsoft team has worked closely with National Bank’s IT team to discuss and understand bank’s needs. With fewer servers to manage, the IT staff is saving time throughout the day. For example, the task of matching virtual machines to storage volumes takes one to two hours less each day than previous server virtualization technologies required. Provisioning a new virtual machine also takes dramatically less time—minutes versus hours—than provisioning a physical server. “Understanding the specific needs of the customer and catering to their software requirements accordingly is the key. Together with Microsoft we will be able to provide better solutions to National Bank of Pakistan leading to total customer satisfaction.” said Asim Haque, Vice President, Infotech (Pvt) Limited.